By now you’ve probably read our review of the RV870 and a half dozen others so you should already know it’s suppose to be a 2.7 TFLOPS chip with 1,600 processors and ultra fast 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The board is totally enclosed, with air vents at the back, and oddly the chip’s connector and heat-sink retention bracket is exposed, which adds a strangely aesthetic appeal. It could be we got an early test unit and the production version will have a cover plate over the chip. You can see the two six-pin power connectors at the top of the rear…

When ATI took us aboard an aircraft carrier in Alameda California a couple of weeks ago to introduce their new Radeon HD5870 code named Cypress, they also showed us their plan for releasing a scaled down version of the new chip code named Juniper. Phase two of their “Sweet spot” program, and on schedule, ATI delivered (literally) their Midrange AIBs the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750. Code named Juniper, the 5770 is an incredible value delivering DirectX 11 performance, with a GB of GDDR5 memory and doing it for a few dollars and a few watts. The new midrange AIBs also…

While multi-card Crossfire/ SLi solutions and chasing record breaking performance get the headlines the bottom line is fueled by the $100 and under AIB’s. The Mainstream segment of the market has always been the monetary sweet spot of the GPU industry. What a company loses in profit margins in the segment is more than made up for in volume. In years past this segment would be reserved for the high-end parts that has fallen from grace and becomes obsolete, however recognizing the importance of this segment (Steam is reporting that 90% of AIB are <$100) GPU companies design GPUs specifically for…

ATI-AMD continued to roll out products in its Evergreen line this week, adding to the Enthusiast segment with the HD 5830. The HD 5830 fits in the lower end of the Enthusiast segment in between the HD 5850 and the HD 5770 with a $240 price point. The following chart puts the new board in perspective with its peers from AMD. HD 5770 HD 5830 HD 5850 GTX 260 Core 216 1.36 TFLOPS 1.79 TFLOPS 2.09 TFLOPS 850 MHz 800 MHz Core Clock 725 MHz 1.2 GHz Core Clock 800 Stream Processors 1120 Stream Processors 1440 Steam Processors 240 Processor…

Performance segment AIBS It’s times like these, and last week, when AMD and Nvidia roll out their latest offerings where we get to see what they’re made of and how well they do in games and compared to each other. In the last issue we checked out the mainstream offerings of the leading AIB suppliers1 and this week we’re putting the Performance segment units, AMD’s new Radeon HD6870, and HD6850 AIBs up against Nvidia’s new GTX 460 AIB. We ran all the tests on an Intel Core i7 x980 3.33 GHz, machine with 3 GB RAM, running Windows 7 - 64bit.…

Announced in December, AMD began shipping the HD7950 in mid-January, and through the magic of modern transportation, one arrived here already, in mid-March, so obviously you’re anxious to read all about its performance characteristics. We have been anxious to put the board to work. For our tests, we run the most common benchmarks and then compare the results as far as price and performance and power to put a product in perspective for consumers. The 79xx series is based on AMD’s most recent Southern Island Series which are based on AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology. The 79xx series are 28nm…

Introducing the new line GPU 14 last week, chief marketing officer Colette La Force rallied the troops in Hawaii, where AMD rolled out the new family of R9 graphics cards. We were able to get our hands on three of the new offerings: the Mainstream segment’s R7 260X, the R9 270X for the Performance segment, and the Enthusiast-class R9 280X. The R7 260X The Mainstream R7 260X is a dual-slot card (or single-slot card, depending on the AIB configuration) mainstream board that has 896 stream processors with a 1.1-GHz core clock and 2 GB of GDDR5. The R7 260X has two…

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